Botany

KIP's analysis of Kythera's botany represents the project's most determined
effort to expand its perspectives beyond cultural issues and to explore
instead the island's position relative to Crete and the Peloponnese
in terms of biogeography (the faunal biogeography of the island is
another obvious target for future analysis, although it can be noted
that the island's location on a bird migration route from Africa to
Europe will make this a challenging investigation). The botanical
research involves primarily the compilation of a species list for
Kythera, accompanied by an analysis of the local ecology of particular
species, both intended for comparative purposes.

False colour composite
satellite image (12/06/98, SPOT V)

A further aim of the botanical fieldwork, however, is to map the
island's vegetation communities, for ecological information and to
assess the impact of human processes such as land-clearance and abandonment.
The latter task combines analysis and re-classification of satellite
imagery by James Conolly with ground-truthing in the field of over
a hundred sample areas, in order to allow extrapolation of results
across the island as a whole. This integrated approach, which appears
to be pioneering in an Aegean context, is testimony to the potential
of combining high-tech data-sets with empirical expertise, and is
made effective in terms of its implementation by the use of lap-top
computers in the field. To date, KIP's botanical analysis addresses
the island's recent vegetation history, but a greater time-depth may
yet be accessible through pollen data from the geoarchaeological coring.